To avoid more threadcrapping in Sacrosanct’s genre thread I thought I’d survey responses to this simple situation:
The PCs have come across an Orc camp about 200ft away. They’re looking down from a hidden location and a bored guard in the rangers sights. The ranger wants to kill the guard so they can continue to stealth into the camp. The ranger draws their bow string and releases an arrow. They roll an attack to see if the arrow hits cleanly (i.e. beats the orc’s AC) and the risk being alerting the camp to danger if it misses. The arrow obviously don’t do enough damage to kill the Orc outright in a regular combat situation, but this is out of combat. How would you adjudicate the action and why?
For me, as the ranger has time to take the perfect shot and the Orc is unsuspecting, I would allow the shot to kill if it beats the AC. My reasoning is, HP models a character’s ability to put up a fight. If you’re not fighting back then you’re not expending HP and thus it is not a factor here. But I have a feeling I’m in a distinct minority
So how would everyone else handle this?
The PCs have come across an Orc camp about 200ft away. They’re looking down from a hidden location and a bored guard in the rangers sights. The ranger wants to kill the guard so they can continue to stealth into the camp. The ranger draws their bow string and releases an arrow. They roll an attack to see if the arrow hits cleanly (i.e. beats the orc’s AC) and the risk being alerting the camp to danger if it misses. The arrow obviously don’t do enough damage to kill the Orc outright in a regular combat situation, but this is out of combat. How would you adjudicate the action and why?
For me, as the ranger has time to take the perfect shot and the Orc is unsuspecting, I would allow the shot to kill if it beats the AC. My reasoning is, HP models a character’s ability to put up a fight. If you’re not fighting back then you’re not expending HP and thus it is not a factor here. But I have a feeling I’m in a distinct minority
So how would everyone else handle this?